Yet Another Scientist Takes on Darwin.

• Position: WHAT'S NEW? - Nathaniel T. Jeanson's 'Replacing Darwin: The New Origin of Species' - Book review

Since Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, entirely new fields of science have been born and matured--fields that hold the keys to the origin of species. With a Ph.D. in cell and developmental biology from Harvard, Nathaniel T. Jeanson certainly is qualified to investigate what genetics reveals about origins, and has released his findings in fle-placing Darwin: The New Origin of Species, published by Master Books, Petersburg, Ky.

On the Origin of Species is considered one of history's most-influential books and has become the foundation of evolutionary biology. This new work asks readers to consider: if Darwin was looking at the same evidence today using modern science, would his conclusions be the same?

"Since 1859, we've had time to reevaluate [Darwin's] picture. A global community of millions of scientists can pool their resources and build on one another's work," says Jeanson. 'The cumulative observations of these scientists have built an unprecedented body of knowledge on the diversity and operation of life."

In Replacing Darwin, Jeanson put forth that this knowledge has rewritten the long-standing explanation for the origin of species. Jeanson uses an analogy to which all readers can relate--a jigsaw puzzle--to illustrate the quest for the answer to the mystery of the origin of species. He contends that Darwin reached his conclusions with only 15%--or perhaps less--of the total pieces of the puzzle. In addition, Jeanson maintains that Darwin tried to piece together his findings without the constraints of edge and corner pieces. If an actual jigsaw puzzle were put together under these conditions, would the participants have had any chance of success?

Jeanson's book begins its account after the publication of the first edition of Darwin's book. Several years after Darwin made his bold claims, Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, who studied inheritance and the origin of traits, published his discoveries, which remain textbook science to this day. In the early 1900s, American scientist Walter Sutton connected chromosomes to Mendel's decades-old discoveries.

The next question for the scientific community was how specifically the chromosomes contained the information for traits. The search led to DNA and James Watson's and Francis Crick's famous discovery of the double helix in 1953.

Writes Jeanson: 'The physical basis for heredity--the nature of the code of life--was not uncovered until nearly 100 years after Darwin wrote On...